As the unit cost of storage continues to trend to zero and that is even with the current premium being charged due to last year’s floods; how do we truly measure the cost of storage and it’s provision?
Now, many of you are now thinking ‘zero’? Really?
And my answer would be that many of the enterprise class arrays are down to a few dollars per gigabyte over five years; certainly for SATA and NL-SAS. So the cost of storing data on spinning rust is heading towards zero; well certainly the unit cost is trending this way.
Of course, as we store ever more data; the total cost of storage continues to rise as the increase in the amount of data we store outstrips the price decline. Dedupe and the likes are a temporary fix which may mean that you can stop buying for period of time but inevitably you will need to start increasing your storage estate at some point.
So what are you going to do? I don’t think that we have a great solution at the moment and current technologies are sticking plasters with a limited life. Our storage estates are becoming like landfill; we can sift for value but ultimately it just hangs around and smells.
It is a fact of life that data management is a discipline much ignored; lots of people point at the Cloud as a solution but we are simply shifting the problem and at some point that’ll come unstuck as well. Cloud appliances will eventually become seen as a false economy; fixing the wrong problem.
Storage has simply become too cheap!
Which is a kind of odd statement for Storagebod to make….